A little over a week ago, I mentioned I was working on a little project and I was starting with the world generation. I've kind of hit a milestone with it and I decided to release a demo program for people to see and possibly get some feedback before I dig deeper into what actually happens in these worlds.

Some screenshots:
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Nothing fantastic, I'm even using two-year old code from lost Cosmos project. I changed the color palette and added some things like forests and rivers and there ya go.

The circles and lines see in the graphs above are the "locations" and "paths" one can take (once the actual game is ready) to travel between places. While having your parties travel from one node to the next, they will fight battles (possibly develop relationships, get a sickness, get an injury, etc.).

Red paths mean that in the game, it will require finishing a quest to unlock. Green paths require a subquest be finished (but most of the time, it just saves travel time). Blue paths are shortcuts, requiring something like extra money or having a Paladin (or any other job) in the party.

Here's a link to check it out in its infancy:
Oldest version: Currently codenamed: MyQuest
Newest Version: 0.0.6

Key commands
Arrow keys: move around the world
Plus/minus (not on pad): Zoom in/out
M key: hide nodes and lines
S key: Open settlement population window

Geographic Locations Generated
Deep-sea trenches
Ocean
Wave crests near land
Beaches
Deserts
Grasslands
Tundra
Safari
Highlands
Permafrost
Mountains: Reddish for hotter areas, Gray-purply for cold
Snow

You can open the config file to change the amount of nodes generated at the bottom of the config file.

The basic process for creating the map (italicized words are the paremeters, usually integer):

1) Start with a flat ground
2) Create mountains: Pick a random location and raise that location by a randomized height. Next, odds of jumping to a different location entirely are based on islands. If not a new location, only move randomly up to island_jump far.
3) Create holes: Same process as mountains, only sinking instead of rising (creates lakes, trenches, etc.)
4) Calculate temperature. First, choose a temperature range, which determines how quickly things get cold from the equator. Then, Create an ozone mask: a bitmap which is littered with ellipses that represent holes or thickness in the ozone. The sun is placed randomly horizontally and in the middle vertically. The temperature for each pixel is then calculated with a formula using the distance of the sun from the planet, the thickness of the ozone on the mask and where the pixel is int the x,y,z (z being height). Humidity is not considered. In cosmos, wind and air pressure were calculated at this point.
5) Render. Create forest spawn locations and ranges and create rivers, allowing them to run down the maps (bit of recursion here, with a small chance to create another river as were flowing down). Each pixels color is then based on height, temperature and whether or not we're a river or forest.

The next steps are in creating the node graph.

[Edit]
Technically, I could turn the sun on (it's currently off). However, the new color palette isn't quite set up right at the moment, so some pixels go out of bounds where its night time.

Thanks. If I manage to get further into the game play to satisfy my hunger, I'll definitely do attempt some touch-ups on the graphics.

I'm tinkering with generating the location names. I probably won't release another version until I have fog of war and have the player moving from node to node rather than just glancing at the whole graph. Some screenies:

http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/597615
http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/597616
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http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/597618

Yeah, I'll probably be tweaking them for a while.

I'm going to go ahead and release a the next pre-alpha verison (it is a WIP afterall), because I figure I won't have much time to work on it until next weekend (if even then). This version gives a somewhat more hands-on feel to what the gameplay is evolving into. At the moment, it is a barren world filled with locations, but no life, other than you. Eventually, there will be townsfolk, members to recruit and battles to wage. All you can do now, is go from location to location and imagine the missing pieces.

Screenshots:
http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/597648
http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/597649

The paths to really mind at this point are the red ones. These are locked paths that would require a quest to be completed. The makeshift quest for now is simply travel to another, reachable node. Once the quest is completed, it'll turn green.

The number under the location's name is the "rank" or the difficulty of that area. Imagine each rank increase is several times harder. Last, but not least, the black node surrounded by purple is the calculated final stage of the game. There could be harder stages, but this one is the one to beat the current generated game.

Myquest V0.0.2

This one really interests me! The location names are pretty funny and I'm in love with the detail of the world generator. Will other inhabitants have an impact on the world at all? For instance, will a town be able to develop a settlement, attack neighbouring towns, deplete resources in an area, etc.

Well, since I haven't had electricity in a week (argh!), I haven't had a chance to do anything with the project. So, I guess I'll just unveil some of the design work to keep the thread alive a little longer.

Nice, that's a town about forty minutes from my house. Currently, there's some degree of measuring the "epicness" of word choice-age, but mainly around dungeon names. As I go, I intend to sort it better to have better outcomes, probably when I upgrade from raw data to using sqlite.

I hope to have as many impacts as possible via AI. That being said, to specifically respond to the examples you listed, I don't currently plan to allow development of settlement during the game (not in the design papers at least). In some situations, "control" of settlements may change alignment (or change into ruins if it were destroyed). Probably won't have depletion of resources.

Character jobs
Overall, the entire idea of the game is to focus around implicit content, simply massaging the player's imagination. This way, I can avoid the things that I'm not as good at, like graphics or music/sfx. Thus, I need a lot for the content generation for different outcomes.

There are three scores the player invests in to build each character: Melee, Mind and Mystique. These act like rock-paper-scissors to some degree (like mind has an advantage over melee, but a high level melee could still beat a low level mind). Melee jobs are like warriors, farmers, knights, etc. Mind are like engineers, librarians and mages. Mystique are like dancers, ninjas and jokers. And, of course, there are jobs for mixed combinations of the three M's.

Next, each character has an alignment: light, neutral and dark. Adjusting these numbers provides the player with unique characters. I have written out a huge table of all the "classifications" based on the numbers. For each M, you can have the stat from 0 to 100. For each 10 (0-9, 10-19, 20-29, etc.) you have one classification per alignment. Thus, you'd have ten classifications for Melee Neutral, if you didn't invest any points on the other M's. Ten more for light and ten more for dark. So each M has 30 different classifications. Naturally, a mixture should also have 30 classifications. That's 120 different titles a character can have. From bouncers to gardners to pirates to prostitutes, the player should have pretty colorful parties.

Furthermore, each job has ten degrees. Like the Nurse job could have the "Candy Striper" degree followed by the "LPN" degree and so on and so forth. Each degree comes with one ability, like "needle prick" or "medicate." Every ability filters to one of five things: healing, buff, attack, debuff, nuke (for lack of better words at the moment). So, while the player is seeing all kinds of different things, ultimately, behind the scenes, everything filters down to the three M stats (plus armor and weapons stats, something I'll get into later), alignment and the five abilities to keep the code relatively straightforward.

Story Arcs
To give a better idea of the point of the game, at the beginning, when the player is setting up what type of game they are going to play, they will choose an overall story arc. This arc is the reason the player's parties are adventuring. Perhaps it could be "to defeat the big bad boss," "prevent the apocalypse," "stop the ever-expanding empire," or "stop the guy from awakening the monster."

During gameplay, the bad AI can advance towards their goal if you don't prevent them. The monster can be awakened! You can lose. And, one story arc can go into another: if the monster is awakened, perhaps now the goal is to defeat the big bad boss. Also, there will probably be the negative goals, like "destroy the planet" and such.

That's design goal anyway. I imagine you can see the complexity of pulling that off...

Essentially yes. I'm hoping to go so far as have a complete simulation mode. Think of The Sims, where if you don't tell the Sim to do something, it'll do what it wants, but you can always override and tell it to do something else. It's almost like a step or two up from Progress Quest, having a bit of actual interaction with the user. Balancing it to get exactly the right amount of interaction I'm expecting to take a while.

Version 0.0.3
Unfortunately, the only time I got to work on the game last week was on Saturday. Here's the items from the version log:

Additions
  * Naming Landmasses
  * Defining Landmass type
  * Defining Regions
  * Settlement population ranges
  * Setting population in nodes
  * New Settlement types
  * New Region Names
  * Determing Node Type

I also worked on a few bugs and got a little caught up with this problem.
http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/597738
http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/597739

And the executable: MyQuest 0.0.3

Lastly, in case I didn't mention it, the world is based on a flat bitmap image. The reason I'm doing this is I want to also be able to put any image as the world. It could be a picture of me. Afterall, the map is just eye candy, the node graph is where all the game revolves around. I could hand draw my own maps. Or, I could use a Final Fantasy map.

Out of curiosity, in-game, how do you explain the travel routes that cross oceans, as they don't always start and end near the coast ? Flying transport lines?
I'm asking because it looks a bit strange when you are at some "harbour" near the shore, and to cross to the other side, you need to first go inland to a mountain, then "jump" in a long route that passes not far from the harbour you were in.

It's coming along nicely. The player locater covers the name of the current town though. It might be nice to describe the available types of travel between one node to the next :

hiking
horseback
train
sea going vessel
balloon (dirigible / hot air balloon)
plane
etc...

This game is starting to look pretty awesome. How are you thinking of doing dungeons?

What's up with the diamondy shape of the mountains? If you notice they seem to be square pyramid shaped, instead of more conical shape of real mountains. I'd imagine you would improve the visual output of your generator greatly if you improved your height generation algorithm.

And yeah, it'd be nice if you had means to introduce your own units into the system, so you are not stuck with the imperial system. I know it's your game and all, but if most of the world can't understand the units you are using, then what's the point of outputting them in the first place?

Also, one place I've been to had a temperature of 141 deg F (60.5 deg Celsius). Quite toasty

EDIT: Thought about adding visible day night cycles?

Cool idea.

What method are using to create random land masses? If you are looking for some interesting methods, check out Perlin Noise and Brownian Bridges.

I'm not too fond of the blurring effect on close zooms. I guess I figured that you would eventually replace the pixel colors with tiles. Something else - the latest version takes up nearly 100% cpu on one core, even when nothing is happening and there is no mouse movement. Looks like you're still making good progress though.